The Handicapped Fudge Experience

If you know me, you know I am obsessed with cooking. I have to make the base of the pizza as well as the topping. I have to have all the ingredients for carrot cake with cream cheese icing in the house at all times. A plot is also underway to make the world's best Hot Cross Buns at Easter.
I have found cakes a very easy and effective way of crossing the language barrier. You take baking into the staff room and you are suddenly a superstar and there's a talking point.
The cooking teacher invited me to hang out with the handicapped kids (until then I didn't even know there were any at my school, is it that I am completely clueless or is my school keeping them eugenics-style out of sight out of mind...) to make mochi, Japanese New Year's gooey cakes made from rice. Went fine, she wanted to reciprocate by having me come in and teach the Chocolate Fudge recipe from the good ol' Kiwi favourite, the Edmond's cookbook. Straightforward you are thinking, well think again. It was farcical to say the least.
I had imagined that I would stand up the front, get the kids to help me measure and put the ingredients into the pot and show them how to make a batch of fudge. Anyone knows, when you are cooking sugar you have to be careful to boil it for the right length of time, but not burn it. However, there were 6 kids, each with a pot. The teachers didn't want me to demonstrate. They got each kids to measure out the sugar and cocoa on a large piece of paper(???) and then carry it precariously over to their workbench and carefully into the pot. Instead of just measuring the stuff straight into the pot....
I digress. It got worse. The kids were in a row with their pots on the gas stove, each stirring madly (think Rain Man) with their fudge boiling at various temperatures. I meanwhile ran up and down the gauntlet with a bottle of vanilla essence trying to adjust temperatures and keep an eye on how ready the fudge was. Because if you don't boil it long enough, it won't set. If you boil it for too long, the sugar will seize in the pot. Which is what happened to 5 out of 6 of the pots. The other pot got burnt, so I transferred the fudge out at lightening pace into another clean pot, at which point that fudge also seized up. The kids scraped crumbly light brown, crappy tasting fugde out of the pots and into the trays which should have been filled with buttery goodness. What could I say. I was embarrassed but frustrated and a little angry. The kids however didn't seem to mind and compulsively chowed down handfuls of the horrible stuff (again think Rain Main). It was great to have such enthusiastic kids, I started having fantasies about starting all over again - but this time I would lock the 2 teachers into a mesh cage in a corner of the cooking room.
Today taught me a really important thing. Sometimes the language barrier isn't the problem, it's the cultural barrier. I grew up with a Mum that showed me from a really young age how to whip stuff up in the kitchen, and it wasn't a big deal. But I don't really think they have that culture here of baking all the time at home. So they just didn't know how to go about a recipe written from a Kiwi perspective. We all have that need to interpret everything into our own culture. Our unfortunate experiment today showed that is not always a good idea.
So my advice to you friends, if it's fudge and it's handicapped and it's Japan - don't do it.